Rose — a color and a flower: Meaning and cultural context

Abstract

The paper focuses on the comparative analysis of dictionary definitions and selected contexts for the word rose, adjective and noun, used both as the name of a flower and of a color. The following dictionaries of the English language are used as sources of definitions: The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language Online, Merriam-Webster Online, Oxford Dictionary Online, The Collins Dictionary Online, Cambridge Dictionary Online, and the Macmillan English Dictionary. A comparative analysis of the entries reveals a number of serious shortcomings. The dictionaries demonstrate a tendency to prioritize highly specific information from the contextual fields of biology and commercial gardening as the basis for their definitions, which disconnects the definition from the majority of the illustrative examples within the entries. The connection of rose to human emotions is either ignored completely or underrepresented. The definitions of rose as the name of a color fail to clarify the specific nature of this color and its semantic link to its homonym. The paper proposes an analysis of more than 700 contexts selected from linguistic corpora (BNC, COCA) and Google search engine, with an alternative model of the polysemic structure of rose, the flower name, as a result. Also outlined is the nature of the semantic motivation of rose, the color, by one of the senses of rose, the flower. The proposed analytical method can considerably improve the quality of dictionary entries by bringing definitions more in line with the actual use of the word in language.